The State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Baden-Württemberg has prohibited the city of Tübingen from using police data for a list of “conspicuous” asylum seekers. This is the result of a press release issued by the data protection commissioner on October 5th. The Data Protection Commissioner has issued a formal prohibition order on the matter. The city of Tübingen had included the data of asylum seekers in a list. These people had allegedly attracted attention through certain types of behavior, mostly brutal crimes (e.g. robbery, assault).
The press release of the Data Protection Commissioner speaks of a “list of conspicuous persons”. With this list, the city wanted to protect its employees from assaults. The Data Protection Commissioner criticized that the list, which is kept internally. It is mainly based on information that the police provide to the city’s foreigner’s department based on legal regulations concerning foreigners. Personal data is included in this list, without the public prosecutor’s office or a court having dealt with the accusation and confirmed it in a procedure under the rule of law. This data provided by the police may only be used for measures under foreigner law and not for other purposes. The change in the purpose of data usage planned by the city no longer has anything to do with the original purpose under foreigner law. The legislator would have to explicitly change the purpose. The city has also been unable to prove that the persons recorded actually posed a concrete danger to the employees of the authorities. Furthermore, “lists of dangerous persons” such as these, which are based on mere suspicion and have not been checked under the rule of law, violate the rights of “foreign fellow citizens”. For the first time, the state’s data protection commissioner made use of an authority that has allowed him to prohibit a municipality from “illegal data processing” for the past two years.
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Impressionen zum Leben in Zeiten der Corona-Pandemie: Foto: tünews INTERNATIONAL; Mostafa Elyasian.
